Journal articles on the topic 'Academic libraries Collection development Decision making Data processing'

Background Consumer health informatics (CHI) originated in the 1990s. With the rapid development of computer and information technology for health decision making, an increasing number of consumers have obtained health-related information through the internet, and CHI has also attracted the attention of an increasing number of scholars. Objective The aim of this study was to analyze the research themes and evolution characteristics of different study periods and to discuss the dynamic evolution path and research theme rules in a time-series framework from the perspective of a strategy map and a data flow in CHI. Methods The Web of Science core collection database of the Institute for Scientific Information was used as the data source to retrieve relevant articles in the field of CHI. SciMAT was used to preprocess the literature data and construct the overlapping map, evolution map, strategic diagram, and cluster network characterized by keywords. Besides, a bibliometric analysis of the general characteristics, the evolutionary characteristics of the theme, and the evolutionary path of the theme was conducted. Results A total of 986 articles were obtained after the retrieval, and 931 articles met the document-type requirement. In the past 21 years, the number of articles increased every year, with a remarkable growth after 2015. The research content in 4 different study periods formed the following 38 themes: patient education, medicine, needs, and bibliographic database in the 1999-2003 study period; world wide web, patient education, eHealth, patients, medication, terminology, behavior, technology, and disease in the 2004-2008 study period; websites, information seeking, physicians, attitudes, technology, risk, food labeling, patient, strategies, patient education, and eHealth in the 2009-2014 study period; and electronic medical records, health information seeking, attitudes, health communication, breast cancer, health literacy, technology, natural language processing, user-centered design, pharmacy, academic libraries, costs, internet utilization, and online health information in the 2015-2019 study period. Besides, these themes formed 10 evolution paths in 3 research directions: patient education and intervention, consumer demand attitude and behavior, and internet information technology application. Conclusions Averaging 93 publications every year since 2015, CHI research is in a rapid growth period. The research themes mainly focus on patient education, health information needs, health information search behavior, health behavior intervention, health literacy, health information technology, eHealth, and other aspects. Patient education and intervention research, consumer demand, attitude, and behavior research comprise the main theme evolution path, whose evolution process has been relatively stable. This evolution path will continue to become the research hotspot in this field. Research on the internet and information technology application is a secondary theme evolution path with development potential.

The collection of data about the identity characteristics of library users is the latest development in a long history of contested categorisation practices. In this article, I highlight how the collection of data about lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people has implications for the undertaking of diversity monitoring exercises in academic and public libraries. Based on experiences in the United Kingdom, I argue that recuperative efforts to ‘fix’ categorisation practices are not enough and overlook how categories of gender, sex and sexuality are constructed through the practice of diversity monitoring, how categories are positioned in time and space, and who is involved in decision-making about who to include and exclude from the category of ‘LGBTQ’.

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>The advancement of science and technology has impacted functioning of the libraries of higher educational institutions, and the mode of providing resources for various academic activities. For many years, libraries attached to educational institutions have been labouring with the question of how to determine the value of journals in their </span><span>specific library collection. The Health Sciences Library of Manipal Academy of Higher Education at Manipal, </span><span>subscribed a vast number of online journals for their users. A relation between the usage and citations of subscribed online journals might provide a basis for the collection management in the libraries of academic and research institutions. The current study resolved to identify whether relationship exists between usage of subscribed online journals and their citations in the academic publications of the health science professionals from 2010 to 2015. The </span><span>study found a statistically significant relationship between subscribed online journal usage and their citations in the </span><span>publications through the inferential test of Spearman’s rank-order correlation. For collection development of online journals, libraries can utilise the usage or citation data of journals as a decision making tool. </span></p></div></div></div>

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a decision-making model for buy vs borrow selection decisions. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conduct a statistical analysis of circulation transactions and Interlibrary Loan (ILL) request data related to Western books as well as the overall subject content of local collections. They compare the relative costs and delivery times for obtaining materials through interlibrary loan channels vs purchase from domestic or foreign publishers. Based on this analysis, they make recommendations for buy vs borrow decision-making model relevant to the Western books collection at the Peking University Library. Findings – For materials available domestically, requesting through ILL is the preferred acquisitions strategy because of the low cost of domestic service and the comparable speed of delivery. Materials that can only be obtained from foreign libraries are best acquired through a combination of purchase-on-demand and ILL. Originality/value – This paper adds to the corpus of professional literature on buy vs borrow collection development models but adds a unique perspective by applying this model to a Western book collection in a Chinese academic library.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to evaluate the pre and post success of patron-driven acquisition (PDA) streaming video projects using financial analysis, thus comparing PDA as a collection building tool against other legacy purchasing practices. Design/methodology/approach This is primarily a quantitative study based on deductive data derived; however, it does include qualitative findings. Hence, it is a mixed study. Findings The study approaches this topic from the viewpoint that ongoing evaluations of PDA projects, based on savings and benefits derived, can be practically conducted and are useful for CD decision-making by purchasing agents in academic libraries. Research limitations/implications Caution should be used when generalizing this study due to its specificity of its library’s collection development (CD) needs and methodology. The study is not intended to be original research, but it builds upon other case studies in this area. Practical implications In addition to improving CD strategies, libraries could use this study to develop a financial valuation methodology, which can help guide purchasing practices. Social implications This study has implications to all library stakeholders. Originality/value Few studies have compared and analyzed streaming video PDA programs using financial analysis in a practical manner to aid library acquisitions.

Efficient decision making based on business intelligence (BI) is essential to ensure competitiveness for sustainable growth. The rapid development of information and communication technology has made collection and analysis of big data essential, resulting in a considerable increase in academic studies on big data and big data analysis (BDA). However, many of these studies are not linked to BI, as companies do not understand and utilize the concepts in an integrated way. Therefore, the purpose of this study is twofold. First, we review the literature on BI, big data, and BDA to show that they are not separate methods but an integrated decision support system. Second, we explore how businesses use big data and BDA practically in conjunction with BI through a case study of sorting and logistics processing of a typical courier enterprise. We focus on the company’s cost efficiency as regards to data collection, data analysis/simulation, and the results from actual application. Our findings may enable companies to achieve management efficiency by utilizing big data through efficient BI without investing in additional infrastructure. It could also give them indirect experience, thereby reducing trial and error in order to maintain or increase competitiveness.

Responding to the global concern on sustainable development, the consistency of localized and global/regional practices impacts the public and civil, economic, social and cultural domains. Challenges of coherent and efficient monitoring system mark the Ukraine’s path and leave space for improvement. The scrutiny of academic and institutional efforts in monitoring the sustainable development, sustainable development goals implementation reveals shortcomings and pitfalls in metadata provision, tools for data collection and processing, congruence of understanding and interpreting the concepts. The outcomes serve to substantiation of the research and educational objectives for examination of the indicator analysis design for better policy- and decision-making, public awareness, spatial patterns representation.

The integrated school system is an application intended to process school data, such as processing student re-registration data, student attendance data, and student payment data. This data is not yet optimal, causing difficulties in finding information about student data and making reports that are not adequate. Therefore, an application that can support and solve these problems is needed. This application is built using the Apache webserver as the web server, using PHP as the programming language, and MySQL in database development. This study aims to design an integrated school system at SMAN 9 Makassar based on client-server. The type of research used is quantitative research, while data collection uses library research methods and field research (observation). The testing method uses black box testing, which focuses on the functional requirements of the software. With the integrated school system at SMAN 9 Makassar based on client-server, it can help staff and employees at SMAN 9 Makassar in terms of managing data related to the school. For example, in managing academic data, finance, libraries, personnel, teacher info, student info, and counseling agency.

The new academic discipline of Data Sciences (DS) has been developed in recent years mainly because of the need to make decisions based on huge amounts of data -- Big Data. In parallel, there has been a huge progress in the development of technologies that enable to identify patterns, to filter big data, and to provide relevant meanings to information, due to machine learning and sophisticated inference techniques. The profession of Data Scientist (or Data Analyst) has become highly demanded in recent years. It is required in the business sector where data is the “oxygen” for business survival; it is needed in the governmental sector in order to improve its services to the citizens; and it is very imperative in the scientific world, where large data depositories collected in varied disciplines have to be integrated, mined and analyzed, in order to enable interdisciplinary research. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the scientific discipline of Data Sciences fits into academic programs intended to prepare data analysts for the business, public, government, and academic sectors. The article first delineates the Data Cycle, which portrays the transformation of data and their derivatives along the route from generation to decision making. The cycle includes the following stages: problem definition  identifying pertinent data sources  data collection, and storing (including cleansing and backup)  data integration  data mining  processing and analysis  visualization  learning and decision-making  feedback for future cycles. Within this cycle, there might be sub cycles, where a number of stages are repeated and reiterated. It should be noted that the data cycle is generic. It might have slight variations under various circumstances, however, there is not much difference between the scientific cycle and all the other cycles. Each stage within the cycle requires different tools, namely hardware and software technologies that support the stage. This article classifies these tools. The final part of the article suggests a typology for academic DS programs. It outlines an academic program that will be offered to those wishing to practice the Data Analyst profession. An introductory course that should be mandatory to all students campus-wide is sketched.

In metal cutting processing, especially in the processing of low-rigidity workpieces, chatter is a key factor affecting many aspects such as surface quality, processing efficiency and tool life. The academic research on chatter mainly focuses on three directions: chatter prediction, real-time detecting, and chatter suppression. With the continuous development of machining toward intelligence, the hot spots and trends of chatter research are also constantly changing. Therefore, an in-depth and systematic summary of the current situation of chatter research is urgently needed. On this basis, it is of great significance to realize the prediction of the hot spots and trends of chatter research. This article summarizes the research status from three aspects of chatter prediction, detecting and suppression, and points out the advantages and limitations of current chatter research. After in-depth discussion, this article also looks forward to the trend of chatter research. The hot spots of chatter research will focus on the following points: (1) Chatter research methods and means based on data-driven. (2) Integrated data collection, processing and decision-making methods. (3) Chatter detecting unit and chatter suppression unit are integrated in the smart spindle. (4) The chatter mechanism and detecting research of robot milling.

Health Economics has now evolved into a complex science that is based on related disciplines, including epidemiology, statistics, psychology, sociology, operations research, and mathematics. Thus, Health Economics is a set of economic and statistical disciplines that serve as the basis for decision-making by healthcare providers and governments. It also includes a set of analytical methods used in the analysis of the healthcare market. Health Economics and Statistics is a modern master’s program with the main objective to prepare statistics specialists who are able to solve complex problems, make appropriate analytical decisions in the field of clinical research and management decisions in the field of public health that involves conducting research and fostering innovation in the face of uncertainty. Studying statistical methods enables students to acquire up-to-date analytical skills applied to clinical research and healthcare management. The objectives of the Master’s program are focused on providing students with the necessary information about international clinical research experience, forming a critical understanding of the pricing process on the healthcare market, as well as the mechanism for reimbursement of medical expenses in the world. In addition, the program will provide students with an understanding of the organization of existing health systems and methods needed to analyze health policies. The advantages of the program are tied to the goals of the acquisition of applied statistical analysis skills, which is an indispensable requirement of high qualification of an analyst in clinical research and public health. This is ensured by: 1) integration of practice with academic training; 2) the opportunity to contribute to the development of one's own potential; 3) expanding the capacity for scientific research; 4) the opportunity to defend a master’s thesis, working on a real project; 5) providing real career perspectives. Thus, the implementation of this program will provide an opportunity to prepare highly qualified specialists – analysts in the field of clinical research and public health. Specialists who are in high demand in the private sector (clinical research market) on the national and international level, in the national, regional and local NGOs and institutions in positions related to the planning, collection, processing, and analysis of clinical and public health data, as well as evaluating the quality of managerial decisions in healthcare. All of this, in turn, will help to ensure the competitiveness of specialists and increase the prestige of the specialty.

Rapid urbanization rates impact significantly on the nature of Land Cover patterns of the environment, which has been evident in the depletion of vegetal reserves and in general modifying the human climatic systems (Henderson, et al., 2017; Kumar, Masago, Mishra, & Fukushi, 2018; Luo and Lau, 2017). This study explores remote sensing classification technique and other auxiliary data to determine LULCC for a period of 50 years (1967-2016). The LULCC types identified were quantitatively evaluated using the change detection approach from results of maximum likelihood classification algorithm in GIS. Accuracy assessment results were evaluated and found to be between 56 to 98 percent of the LULC classification. The change detection analysis revealed change in the LULC types in Minna from 1976 to 2016. Built-up area increases from 74.82ha in 1976 to 116.58ha in 2016. Farmlands increased from 2.23 ha to 46.45ha and bared surface increases from 120.00ha to 161.31ha between 1976 to 2016 resulting to decline in vegetation, water body, and wetlands. The Decade of rapid urbanization was found to coincide with the period of increased Public Private Partnership Agreement (PPPA). Increase in farmlands was due to the adoption of urban agriculture which has influence on food security and the environmental sustainability. The observed increase in built up areas, farmlands and bare surfaces has substantially led to reduction in vegetation and water bodies. The oscillatory nature of water bodies LULCC which was not particularly consistent with the rates of urbanization also suggests that beyond the urbanization process, other factors may influence the LULCC of water bodies in urban settlements. Keywords: Minna, Niger State, Remote Sensing, Land Surface Characteristics References Akinrinmade, A., Ibrahim, K., & Abdurrahman, A. (2012). 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Data mining is the process of finding interesting patterns and models from massive datasets. In the field of natural and physical sciences, data collection, management, and analysis have evolved as the most trustworthy source of information and emergence of new findings, information, and products. The development of the most effective procedures in statistical circumstances has therefore become standard practice in the academic and industry sectors. Under actual situations, dealing with enormous datasets, there are bound to be discrepancies and abnormalities of many types that prohibit us from knowing the true results of realistic issues. These concepts and trends are helpful in decision-making situations. The quality of the data is the most important factor in data mining. For efficient information mining, computer-based data pre-processing approaches provide methods that assist the data under processing in conforming to conventional structures, hence significantly improving the efficiency of computer algorithms.

Exponential technological development as seen in the 21st century has led to the generation of the very large volume of data in different formats and at a very high speed, such that traditional processing methods cannot be used to process these data. With the evolution of big data and its processing techniques, useful information has been derived from these volumes of data that has been useful in decision making in various domains, education inclusive. In the developed economy land stride has been made in the use of big data analytics especially academic and learning analytics, but such cannot be said in the developing economy like sub-Saharan Africa. Researchers have done thorough work on the benefits and challenges of big data as a trend and in extension big data analytics in education. This work systematically reviewed works in big data, academic analytics, learning analytics, identifying generalized challenges of big data and it extends to identifying salient factors that are hindering adoption of big data in educationin sub-Saharan Africa in line with the 4th sustainable development goal 2030Development Agenda of the United Nations; using online sources as it bulk of data collection. These issues that formed the gap are addressed in the different sections of the article.

At one point in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, looked up from a book on his table to the edifice of the gothic cathedral, visible from his canon’s cell in the cloister of Notre Dame: “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” (146). Frollo’s lament, that the book would destroy the edifice, captures the medieval cleric’s anxiety about the way in which Gutenberg’s print technology would become the new universal means for recording and communicating humanity’s ideas and artistic expression, replacing the grand monuments of architecture, human engineering, and craftsmanship. For Hugo, architecture was “the great handwriting of humankind” (149). The cathedral as the material outcome of human technology was being replaced by the first great machine—the printing press. At this point in the third millennium, some people undoubtedly have similar anxieties to Frollo: is it now the book’s turn to be destroyed by yet another great machine? The inclusion of “post print” in our title is not intended to sound the death knell of the book. Rather, we contend that despite the enduring value of print, digital publishing is “present and active” and is changing the way in which research, particularly in the humanities, is being undertaken. Our approach has three related parts. First, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way in which content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a global, distributed network. This section argues that the transition from print to electronic or digital publishing means both losses and gains, particularly with respect to shifts in our approaches to textuality, information, and innovative publishing. Second, we discuss the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project, with which we are involved. This case study of a digitising initiative opens out the transformative possibilities and challenges of digital publishing and e-scholarship for research communities. Third, we reflect on technology’s capacity to bring about major changes in the light of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen from our discussion. I. Digitising in a “post-print age” We are living in an era that is commonly referred to as “the late age of print” (see Kho) or the “post-print age” (see Gunkel). According to Aarseth, we have reached a point whereby nearly all of our public and personal media have become more or less digital (37). As Kho notes, web newspapers are not only becoming increasingly more popular, but they are also making rather than losing money, and paper-based newspapers are finding it difficult to recruit new readers from the younger generations (37). Not only can such online-only publications update format, content, and structure more economically than print-based publications, but their wide distribution network, speed, and flexibility attract advertising revenue. Hype and hyperbole aside, publishers are not so much discarding their legacy of print, but recognising the folly of not embracing innovative technologies that can add value by presenting information in ways that satisfy users’ needs for content to-go or for edutainment. As Kho notes: “no longer able to satisfy customer demand by producing print-only products, or even by enabling online access to semi-static content, established publishers are embracing new models for publishing, web-style” (42). Advocates of online publishing contend that the major benefits of online publishing over print technology are that it is faster, more economical, and more interactive. However, as Hovav and Gray caution, “e-publishing also involves risks, hidden costs, and trade-offs” (79). The specific focus for these authors is e-journal publishing and they contend that while cost reduction is in editing, production and distribution, if the journal is not open access, then costs relating to storage and bandwith will be transferred to the user. If we put economics aside for the moment, the transition from print to electronic text (e-text), especially with electronic literary works, brings additional considerations, particularly in their ability to make available different reading strategies to print, such as “animation, rollovers, screen design, navigation strategies, and so on” (Hayles 38). Transition from print to e-text In his book, Writing Space, David Bolter follows Victor Hugo’s lead, but does not ask if print technology will be destroyed. Rather, he argues that “the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries” (2). As Hayles noted above, one significant indicator of this change, which is a consequence of the shift from analogue to digital, is the addition of graphical, audio, visual, sonic, and kinetic elements to the written word. A significant consequence of this transition is the reinvention of the book in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by space and time. Rather, it is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors, and texts. The Web 2.0 platform has enabled more experimentation with blending of digital technology and traditional writing, particularly in the use of blogs, which have spawned blogwriting and the wikinovel. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community … and Why We Should Worry is a wikinovel or blog book that was produced over a series of weeks with contributions from other bloggers (see: http://www.sivacracy.net/). Penguin Books, in collaboration with a media company, “Six Stories to Start,” have developed six stories—“We Tell Stories,” which involve different forms of interactivity from users through blog entries, Twitter text messages, an interactive google map, and other features. For example, the story titled “Fairy Tales” allows users to customise the story using their own choice of names for characters and descriptions of character traits. Each story is loosely based on a classic story and links take users to synopses of these original stories and their authors and to online purchase of the texts through the Penguin Books sales website. These examples of digital stories are a small part of the digital environment, which exploits computer and online technologies’ capacity to be interactive and immersive. As Janet Murray notes, the interactive qualities of digital environments are characterised by their procedural and participatory abilities, while their immersive qualities are characterised by their spatial and encyclopedic dimensions (71–89). These immersive and interactive qualities highlight different ways of reading texts, which entail different embodied and cognitive functions from those that reading print texts requires. As Hayles argues: the advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes (89–90). The transition to e-text also highlights how digitality is changing all aspects of everyday life both inside and outside the academy. Online teaching and e-research Another aspect of the commercial arm of publishing that is impacting on academe and other organisations is the digitising and indexing of print content for niche distribution. Kho offers the example of the Mark Logic Corporation, which uses its XML content platform to repurpose content, create new content, and distribute this content through multiple portals. As the promotional website video for Mark Logic explains, academics can use this service to customise their own textbooks for students by including only articles and book chapters that are relevant to their subject. These are then organised, bound, and distributed by Mark Logic for sale to students at a cost that is generally cheaper than most textbooks. A further example of how print and digital materials can form an integrated, customised source for teachers and students is eFictions (Trimmer, Jennings, & Patterson). eFictions was one of the first print and online short story anthologies that teachers of literature could customise to their own needs. Produced as both a print text collection and a website, eFictions offers popular short stories in English by well-known traditional and contemporary writers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Europe, with summaries, notes on literary features, author biographies, and, in one instance, a YouTube movie of the story. In using the eFictions website, teachers can build a customised anthology of traditional and innovative stories to suit their teaching preferences. These examples provide useful indicators of how content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a distributed network. However, the question remains as to how to measure their impact and outcomes within teaching and learning communities. As Harley suggests in her study on the use and users of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, several factors warrant attention, such as personal teaching style, philosophy, and specific disciplinary requirements. However, in terms of understanding the benefits of digital resources for teaching and learning, Harley notes that few providers in her sample had developed any plans to evaluate use and users in a systematic way. In addition to the problems raised in Harley’s study, another relates to how researchers can be supported to take full advantage of digital technologies for e-research. The transformation brought about by information and communication technologies extends and broadens the impact of research, by making its outputs more discoverable and usable by other researchers, and its benefits more available to industry, governments, and the wider community. Traditional repositories of knowledge and information, such as libraries, are juggling the space demands of books and computer hardware alongside increasing reader demand for anywhere, anytime, anyplace access to information. Researchers’ expectations about online access to journals, eprints, bibliographic data, and the views of others through wikis, blogs, and associated social and information networking sites such as YouTube compete with the traditional expectations of the institutions that fund libraries for paper-based archives and book repositories. While university libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase all hardcover books relevant to numerous and varied disciplines, a significant proportion of their budgets goes towards digital repositories (e.g., STORS), indexes, and other resources, such as full-text electronic specialised and multidisciplinary journal databases (e.g., Project Muse and Proquest); electronic serials; e-books; and specialised information sources through fast (online) document delivery services. An area that is becoming increasingly significant for those working in the humanities is the digitising of historical and cultural texts. II. Bringing back the dead: The CLDR project The CLDR project is led by researchers and librarians at the Queensland University of Technology, in collaboration with Deakin University, University of Sydney, and members of the AustLit team at The University of Queensland. The CLDR project is a “Research Community” of the electronic bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which is working towards the goal of providing a complete bibliographic record of the nation’s literature. AustLit offers users with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on Australian writers, their works, and other aspects of Australian literary culture and activities. AustLit and its Research Communities are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and financial and in-kind contributions from a consortium of Australian universities, and by other external funding sources such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Like other more extensive digitisation projects, such as Project Gutenberg and the Rosetta Project, the CLDR project aims to provide a centralised access point for digital surrogates of early published works of Australian children’s literature, with access pathways to existing resources. The first stage of the CLDR project is to provide access to digitised, full-text, out-of-copyright Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945, with selected digitised critical works relevant to the field. Texts comprise a range of genres, including poetry, drama, and narrative for young readers and picture books, songs, and rhymes for infants. Currently, a selection of 75 e-texts and digital scans of original texts from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive have been linked to the Children’s Literature Research Community. By the end of 2009, the CLDR will have digitised approximately 1000 literary texts and a significant number of critical works. Stage II and subsequent development will involve digitisation of selected texts from 1945 onwards. A precursor to the CLDR project has been undertaken by Deakin University in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, whereby a digital bibliographic index comprising Victorian School Readers has been completed with plans for full-text digital surrogates of a selection of these texts. These texts provide valuable insights into citizenship, identity, and values formation from the 1930s onwards. At the time of writing, the CLDR is at an early stage of development. An extensive survey of out-of-copyright texts has been completed and the digitisation of these resources is about to commence. The project plans to make rich content searchable, allowing scholars from children’s literature studies and education to benefit from the many advantages of online scholarship. What digital publishing and associated digital archives, electronic texts, hypermedia, and so forth foreground is the fact that writers, readers, publishers, programmers, designers, critics, booksellers, teachers, and copyright laws operate within a context that is highly mediated by technology. In his article on large-scale digitisation projects carried out by Cornell and University of Michigan with the Making of America collection of 19th-century American serials and monographs, Hirtle notes that when special collections’ materials are available via the Web, with appropriate metadata and software, then they can “increase use of the material, contribute to new forms of research, and attract new users to the material” (44). Furthermore, Hirtle contends that despite the poor ergonomics associated with most electronic displays and e-book readers, “people will, when given the opportunity, consult an electronic text over the print original” (46). If this preference is universally accurate, especially for researchers and students, then it follows that not only will the preference for electronic surrogates of original material increase, but preference for other kinds of electronic texts will also increase. It is with this preference for electronic resources in mind that we approached the field of children’s literature in Australia and asked questions about how future generations of researchers would prefer to work. If electronic texts become the reference of choice for primary as well as secondary sources, then it seems sensible to assume that researchers would prefer to sit at the end of the keyboard than to travel considerable distances at considerable cost to access paper-based print texts in distant libraries and archives. We considered the best means for providing access to digitised primary and secondary, full text material, and digital pathways to existing online resources, particularly an extensive indexing and bibliographic database. Prior to the commencement of the CLDR project, AustLit had already indexed an extensive number of children’s literature. Challenges and dilemmas The CLDR project, even in its early stages of development, has encountered a number of challenges and dilemmas that centre on access, copyright, economic capital, and practical aspects of digitisation, and sustainability. These issues have relevance for digital publishing and e-research. A decision is yet to be made as to whether the digital texts in CLDR will be available on open or closed/tolled access. The preference is for open access. As Hayles argues, copyright is more than a legal basis for intellectual property, as it also entails ideas about authorship, creativity, and the work as an “immaterial mental construct” that goes “beyond the paper, binding, or ink” (144). Seeking copyright permission is therefore only part of the issue. Determining how the item will be accessed is a further matter, particularly as future technologies may impact upon how a digital item is used. In the case of e-journals, the issue of copyright payment structures are evolving towards a collective licensing system, pay-per-view, and other combinations of print and electronic subscription (see Hovav and Gray). For research purposes, digitisation of items for CLDR is not simply a scan and deliver process. Rather it is one that needs to ensure that the best quality is provided and that the item is both accessible and usable by researchers, and sustainable for future researchers. Sustainability is an important consideration and provides a challenge for institutions that host projects such as CLDR. Therefore, items need to be scanned to a high quality and this requires an expensive scanner and personnel costs. Files need to be in a variety of formats for preservation purposes and so that they may be manipulated to be useable in different technologies (for example, Archival Tiff, Tiff, Jpeg, PDF, HTML). Hovav and Gray warn that when technology becomes obsolete, then content becomes unreadable unless backward integration is maintained. The CLDR items will be annotatable given AustLit’s NeAt funded project: Aus-e-Lit. The Aus-e-Lit project will extend and enhance the existing AustLit web portal with data integration and search services, empirical reporting services, collaborative annotation services, and compound object authoring, editing, and publishing services. For users to be able to get the most out of a digital item, it needs to be searchable, either through double keying or OCR (optimal character recognition). The value of CLDR’s contribution The value of the CLDR project lies in its goal to provide a comprehensive, searchable body of texts (fictional and critical) to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. Other projects seem to be intent on putting up as many items as possible to be considered as a first resort for online texts. CLDR is more specific and is not interested in simply generating a presence on the Web. Rather, it is research driven both in its design and implementation, and in its focussed outcomes of assisting academics and students primarily in their e-research endeavours. To this end, we have concentrated on the following: an extensive survey of appropriate texts; best models for file location, distribution, and use; and high standards of digitising protocols. These issues that relate to data storage, digitisation, collections, management, and end-users of data are aligned with the “Development of an Australian Research Data Strategy” outlined in An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework (2006). CLDR is not designed to simply replicate resources, as it has a distinct focus, audience, and research potential. In addition, it looks at resources that may be forgotten or are no longer available in reproduction by current publishing companies. Thus, the aim of CLDR is to preserve both the time and a period of Australian history and literary culture. It will also provide users with an accessible repository of rare and early texts written for children. III. Future directions It is now commonplace to recognize that the Web’s role as information provider has changed over the past decade. New forms of “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition” (Oblinger and Lombardi) are emerging within and outside formal research communities. Technology’s capacity to initiate major cultural, social, educational, economic, political and commercial shifts has conditioned us to expect the “next big thing.” We have learnt to adapt swiftly to the many challenges that online technologies have presented, and we have reaped the benefits. As the examples in this discussion have highlighted, the changes in online publishing and digitisation have provided many material, network, pedagogical, and research possibilities: we teach online units providing students with access to e-journals, e-books, and customized archives of digitised materials; we communicate via various online technologies; we attend virtual conferences; and we participate in e-research through a global, digital network. In other words, technology is deeply engrained in our everyday lives. In returning to Frollo’s concern that the book would destroy architecture, Umberto Eco offers a placatory note: “in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else” (n. pag.). Eco’s point has relevance to our discussion of digital publishing. The transition from print to digital necessitates a profound change that impacts on the ways we read, write, and research. As we have illustrated with our case study of the CLDR project, the move to creating digitised texts of print literature needs to be considered within a dynamic network of multiple causalities, emergent technological processes, and complex negotiations through which digital texts are created, stored, disseminated, and used. Technological changes in just the past five years have, in many ways, created an expectation in the minds of people that the future is no longer some distant time from the present. Rather, as our title suggests, the future is both present and active. References Aarseth, Espen. “How we became Postdigital: From Cyberstudies to Game Studies.” Critical Cyber-culture Studies. Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 37–46. An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework: Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee. Commonwealth of Australia, 2006. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. Eco, Umberto. “The Future of the Book.” 1994. 3 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Gunkel, David. J. “What's the Matter with Books?” Configurations 11.3 (2003): 277–303. Harley, Diane. “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Research and Occasional Papers Series. Berkeley: University of California. Centre for Studies in Higher Education. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Hirtle, Peter B. “The Impact of Digitization on Special Collections in Libraries.” Libraries & Culture 37.1 (2002): 42–52. Hovav, Anat and Paul Gray. “Managing Academic E-journals.” Communications of the ACM 47.4 (2004): 79–82. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1993. Kho, Nancy D. “The Medium Gets the Message: Post-Print Publishing Models.” EContent 30.6 (2007): 42–48. Oblinger, Diana and Marilyn Lombardi. “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education.” Opening up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education Through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Liyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 389–400. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Trimmer, Joseph F., Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. eFictions. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

This article argues that digital curation—the art and science of searching, analysing, selecting, and organising content—can be used to promote the development of digital information literacy skills among higher education students. Rather than relying on institutionally approved journal articles that have been pre-ordained as suitable for a given purpose, digital curation tools allow students to evaluate the quality of Web based-based content and then present it in an attractive form, all of which contributes to the cultivation of their digital literacy skills. We draw on a case study in which first- year information and communications technology (ICT) students used the digital curation platform Scoop.it to curate an annotated collection of resources pertaining to a particular topic. The notion of curation has undergone a significant transformation in the wake of an increasingly digital society. To “curate,” traditionally referred to as “taking care,” has morphed into a process of cataloguing, accessing, and representing artefacts. In the digital age, curation is a way of sifting, organising, and making sense of the plethora of information; it has become an important life skill without which one cannot fully participate in digital life. Moreover, the ready availability of information, made possible by the ubiquity of Internet technology, makes digital curation an essential skill for the twenty-first 21st century learner. In answer to this need, we are seeing the emergence of suites of digital tools, dubbed “‘curation”’ tools, that meet the perceived need to locate, select, and synthesise Web content into open, user-organised collections. With information overload, a distinctive feature of the Internet, the ability to sift through the noise and dross to select high- quality, relevant content—selected on the basis of authority, currency, and fitness-for-purpose—is indeed a valuable skill. To examine this issue, we performed a case study in which a group of first- year Information and Communication Technology (ICT) students curated Web- based resources to inform an assessment task. We argue that curation platforms, such as Scoop.it, can be effective at cultivating the digital information literacy skills of higher education students. Digital Curation Traditionally, curation is a practice most commonly associated with the Art world— something reserved for the curators of art exhibitions and museums. However, in today’s world, digital curation tools, such as Scoop.it, make it possible for the amateur curator to collect and arrange content pertaining to a particular topic in a professional way. While definitions of curation in the context of the online environment have been proposed (Scime; Wheeler; Rosenbaum), these have not been aligned to the building of core digital information literacy competencies. The digital curator must give due consideration to the materials they choose to include in a digital collection, which necessitates engaging in a certain amount of metacognitive-cognitive reasoning. For the purpose of this article, the following definition of digital curation is proposed: “Curation can be summarised as an active process whereby content/artefacts are purposely selected to be preserved for future access. In the digital environment, additional elements can be leveraged, such as the inclusion of social media to disseminate collected content, the ability for other users to suggest content or leave comments and the critical evaluation and selection of the aggregated content”. (Antonio, Martin, and Stagg).This definition exemplifies the digital information literacy skills at work in the curation of digital content. It can be further broken down to elucidate the core competencies involved: “Curation can be summarised as an active process whereby content/artefacts are purposely selected.” (Antonio, Martin and Stagg). The user, who curates a particular topic, actively chooses the content they want to appear in their collection. The content must be relevant, up-to-date, and from reputable sources or databases. Achieving this requires a degree of information literacy both in terms of justifying the content that is selected and, conversely, that which is not. The second part of the definition is: “In the digital environment, additional elements can be leveraged, such as the inclusion of social media to disseminate collected content, the ability for other users to suggest content or leave comments.” (Antonio, Martin and Stagg). The digital curator is engaged and immersed in Web 2.0 technologies, ranging from the curation tools themselves to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The use of these tools thus requires at least basic digital literacy skills, which can potentially be further developed through continued engagement with them. Finally, curation involves the “human-mediated automation of content collection.” (Antonio, Martin and Stagg). The curator must accept or reject the content generated by the search algorithm, which necessitates a level of metacognitive-cognitive analysis to determine the value of a piece of content. While there are countless tools laying claim to the digital curation label, including Pinterest, Storify, and Pearltrees, Scoop.it was selected for this study, as the authors consider that it adheres most closely to the stated definition of curation. Scoop.it requires the user to define the sources from which content will be suggested and to make an informed decision about which pieces of content are appropriate for the collection they are creating. This requires the curator to critically evaluate the relevance, currency, and validity (information literacy) of the suggested materials. Additionally, users can include content from other Scoop.it pages, which is referred to as “re-scooping”. Scoop.it therefore relies on an active editorial role undertaken by the user in the selection, or rejection, of content. That is, the owner of a particular collection makes the final decision regarding what will appear on their Scoop.it page. The content is then displayed visually with the collection growing as new content is added. The successful use of Scoop.it depends on the curator’s ability to interpret and critically assess digital information. This study is thus built on the premise that the metacognitive processes inherent in the discovery of traditional, non-Web based information are transferable to the digital environment and Scoop.it can, as such, be utilised for the cultivation of digital information literacy skills. Digital Information Literacy According to the Laboratory for Innovative Technology in Education at the University of Houston, “digital information literacy” refers to the ability to effectively analyse and evaluate evidence; to analyse and evaluate alternate points of view; to synthesise and make connections between information and arguments; and to reflect critically, interpret, and draw conclusions based on analysis. Research suggests that the digital information literacy skills of higher education students are inadequate (White; Antonio, Tuffley and Martin) and that further training in how to assess the value, credibility, and reliability of information is required. According to the CIBER’s Information Behaviour report, students’ often believe that they are information literate (based on their ability to check the validity of sources) and yet, in reality, their methods may not be sufficiently rigorous to qualify. Students may not be adequately equipped with the information literacy skills required to retrieve and critically evaluate sources outside of those that are institutionally provided, such as textbooks and assigned readings. Moreover, a report by the Committee of Inquiry (Hughes) addresses both the digital divide among students and the responsibility of the higher education sector to ensure that students are equipped with the information literacy skills required to search, authenticate, and critically evaluate material from multiple sources. Throughout history, educators have been teaching traditional literacy skills—reading, writing, finding information in libraries—to students. However, in an increasingly digital society, where a wealth of information is available online, higher education institutions need to teach students how to apply these metacognitive skills—searching, retrieving, authenticating, critically evaluating, and attributing material—to the online environment. Many institutions continue to adhere to the age-old practice of exclusive use of peer-reviewed sources for assessment tasks (Antonio and Tuffley). We argue that this is an unnecessary limitation; when students are denied access to non- peer-reviewed Web -based resources, they are not developing the skills they need to determine the credibility of digital information. While it is not suggested that the solution is to simply allow students to use Wikipedia as their primary reference point, we acknowledge that printed texts and journal articles are not the only source of credible, authoritative information. The current study is thus built on the premise that students need opportunities to help them develop their digital information literacy skills and, in order to do this, they must interact with and utilise Web -based content. The desirability of using curation tools for developing students’ digital information literacy skills thus forms the foundation of this article. Method For the purpose of this study, a group of 258 first-year students enrolled in a Communications for ICT course curated digital content for the research component of an assessment task. These ICT students were selected, firstly, because a level of proficiency with digital technology was assumed and, secondly, because previous course evaluations indicated a desire on the part of the students for technology to be integrated into the course, as a traditional essay was deemed unsuitable for ICT students. The assignment consisted of two parts: a written essay about an emerging technology and an annotated bibliography. The students were required to create a Scoop.it presentation on a particular area of technology and curate content that would assist the essay-writing component of the task. On completion of the assessment task, the students submitted their Scoop.it URL to the course lecturer and were invited to complete an anonymous online survey. The survey consisted of 20 questions—eight addressed demographic factors, three were open- ended (qualitative), and nine multiple choice items specifically assessed the students’ beliefs about whether or not the digital curation task had helped them develop their digital information literacy skills. The analysis below pertains to these nine multiple -choice items. Results and Discussion Of the 258 students who completed the assessment task, 89 participated in the survey. The students were asked: “What were the primary benefits of using the curation tool Scoop.it?” The students were permitted to select multiple responses for this item: 69% of participants said the primary benefit of using Scoop.it was “Engaging with my topic”, while 62% said “Learning how to use a new tool”; and 53% said “Learning how to assess the value of Web- based content” was the primary benefit of the curation task. This suggests that the process of digital curation as described in this project could, potentially, be used to enhance students’ digital information literacy skills. It is noteworthy that the participants in this study were not given any specific instructions on how to assess online information before doing the assignment. They were presented with a one-page summary of what constitutes an annotated bibliography; however, a specific set of guidelines for the types of processes that could be considered indicative of digital information literacy skills was not provided. This might have included the date, for currency; author credentials; cross-checking with other sources etc. It is therefore remarkable that more than 50% of respondents believed that the act of curation had positively impacted their performance on this assessment task and enhanced their ability to critically assess the value of Web -based content. This strongly suggests that the simple act of being exposed to online information, and using it in a purposeful way (in this case to research an emerging technology), can aid the development of critical thinking skills. The students were asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with a series of eight statements, each of which addressed a specific component of digital information literacy. Responses were presented on a Likert scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The students’ responses for strongly agree and agree and strongly disagree and disagree were conflated. Statement 1: The use of Scoop.it helped me develop my critical thinking skills. 44% of respondents agreed that the curation tool Scoop.it had helped them develop their critical thinking skills and 30% disagreed. Statement 2: As a result of using Scoop.it, I feel I can make judgments about the value of digital content. 43% of respondents agreed and compared to 22% who disagreed that the curation tool Scoop.it had helped them make judgments about the value of digital content. Statement 3: As a result of using Scoop.it, I feel I can synthesise and organise ideas and information. 58% of respondents agreed that curation via Scoop.it helped them synthesise and organise ideas and information, while and 14% disagreed. Statement 4: As a result of using Scoop.it, I feel I can make judgments about the currency of information. 43% of respondents agreed and 21% disagreed that using Scoop.it had assisted them in their ability to make judgments about the currency of information. Statement 5: As a result of using Scoop.it, I feel I can analyse content in depth. 37% of respondents agreed that the curation task had helped them analyse content in-depth. In contrast, 21% disagreed. Statements 1 to 5 each address a specific component of digital information literacy—the ability to think critically; to make judgments about the value of content; to synthesise and organise ideas and information; to make judgments about the currency of the information; and to analyse content in depth. In response to each of these five components, a greater percentage of students agreed than disagreed that the Scoop.it task helped them develop their digital information literacy skills. By its very nature, Scoop.it generates content based on the key-word parameters entered by the user when creating a given topic. The user is then responsible from for trawling through and evaluating this content in order to make an informed decision about what content they wish to appear on their Scoop.it page. As such, it is perhaps not particularly surprising that the students in this study indicated that the practice of curating content helped them develop their digital information literacy skills. It would, however, be interesting to explore whether or not these students were confident in their abilities prior to undertaking the Scoop.it task, as previous research (CIBER) suggests. Without this information, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the success, or otherwise, of the curation task for cultivating the digital information literacy skills of higher education students. Statement 6: As a result of using Scoop.it, I feel able to cite Web-based information. 48% of respondents agreed that using Scoop.it had assisted them in citing Web-based information, while and 24% disagreed. Statement 7: As a result of using Scoop.it, I feel confident in my ability to use Web -based content in my assignments. 52% of respondents believed that using Scoop.it to curate resources had positively contributed to their confidence in using web-based content for their assignments, compared to 17% who disagreed. The results of statements 6 and 7 indicate that further instruction in using and citing non- peer-reviewed online resources may be required; however, this will not be possible if higher education institutions continue to mandate the exclusive use of journal articles and textbooks, to the exclusion of other non-peer- reviewed Web-based information, such as blogs and wikis. More than half of the students were more confident using digital information following the Scoop.it task, which suggests that the opportunity to engage with the alternate sources of information generated by the Scoop.it platform (such as blogs and wikis and digital newspapers) encouraged the students to think critically about how such sources can be incorporated into academic writing. Statement 8: As a result of using Scoop.it, I feel I can distinguish between good and bad Web-based content. While 38% of students who responded to the survey said that using Scoop.it to curate content had enabled them to distinguish between high- and low- quality information, 25% did not believe that this was the case, and an additional 37% were neither confident nor unconfident about distinguishing between good and bad Web-based content. In keeping with previous research (White), the results of this case study suggest that, while many students believed that the Scoop.it task encouraged them to think critically about the quality of non- peer-reviewed digital resources, they are were not necessarily confident in their ability to distinguish good from poor content. The implication, as Hughes contends, is that there is a need for educators to ensure that higher education students are equipped with these metacognitive-cognitive skills prior to leaving university, as it is imperative that we produce graduates who can function in an increasingly digital society. Conclusion The rising tide of digital information in the twenty-first 21st century necessitates the development of new approaches to making sense of the information found on the World Wide Web. Such is the exponentially expanding volume of this information on the Web—so-called ‘big data’—, that, unless a new breed of tools for sifting and arranging information is made available to those who use the Web for information- gathering, their capacity to deal with the volume will be overwhelmed. The new breed of digital curation tools, such as Scoop.it, are a rational response to this emerging issue. We have made the case that, by using digital curation tools to make sense of data, users are able to discern, at least to some extent, the quality and reliability of information. While this is not a substitute for peer-reviewed, academically rigorous sources, digital curation tools arguably have a supplementary role in an educational context—perhaps as a preliminary method for gathering general information about a topic area before diving deeper with peer-reviewed articles in the second pass. This dual perspective may prove to be a beneficial approach, as it has the virtue of considering both the breadth and depth of a topic. Even without formal instruction on assessing the value of Web content, no less than 53% of participants felt the primary benefit of using the digital curation tool was assessing the value of such content. This result strongly indicates the potential benefits of combining digital curation tools with formal, content-evaluation instruction. This represents a promising avenue for future research.References Antonio, A., N. Martin, and A. Stagg. “Engaging Higher Education Students via Digital Curation.” Future Challenges, Sustainable Futures (2012). 10 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/wellington12/2012/pagec16a.html›. Antonio, A., D. Tuffley, and N. Martin. “Creating Active Engagement and Cultivating Information Literacy Skills via Scoop.it.” Electric Dreams (2013). 4 May 2015 ‹http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney13/program/proceedings.pdf›. Antonio, A., and D. Tuffley. “Creating Educational Networking Opportunities with Scoop.it.” Journal of Creative Communications 9.2 (2014): 185-97. CIBER. “Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future.” JISC (2008). 5 May 2015 ‹http://partners.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=rh&catcode=_re_rp_02&rid=15879›. Hughes, A. “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.” JISC (2009). 6 May 2015 ‹http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/generalpublications/2009/heweb2.aspx›. Laboratory for Innovative Technology in Education. “New Technologies and 21st Century Skills.” (2013). 5 May 2015 ‹http://newtech.coe.uh.edu/›. Rosenbaum, S. “Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay.” Mashable 3 Mar. 2010. 7 May 2015 ‹http://mashable.com/2010/05/03/content-curation-creation/›. Scime, E. “The Content Strategist as Digital Curator.” Dopedata 8 Dec. 2009. 30 May 2012 ‹http://www.dopedata.com/2009/12/08/the-content-strategits-as-digital-curator/›. Wheeler, S. “The Great Collective.” 2011. ‹http://stevewheeler.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/great-collective.html#!/2011/07/great-collective.html›. White, D. “Digital Visitors and Residents: Progress Report.” JISC (2012). 28 May 2012 ‹http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/vandr.html›.

While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. 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